What actually gets my content on the right people's screens

There was a period, maybe three months in, where I had a note on my phone that just said "algorithm notes." It had seventeen bullet points. Tips I'd gathered from YouTube videos about YouTube, TikTok breakdowns about TikTok, creator podcasts where people talked in confident specifics about hook structures and retention curves and something called "watch time percentage as a signal of thumb-stop rate." I would add to the note every few days. I would read it before filming. I tried things. I measured them. I got mildly obsessed in that particular way that feels productive but is secretly just sophisticated avoidance of actually making the thing.

I think a lot of early creators go through something like this. The algorithm feels like a puzzle that, if you could just crack it, would open the door. And there are enough people online who speak about it with enough confidence — enough graphs, enough case studies — that it's easy to believe the puzzle is solvable if you study hard enough. So you study instead of making. You prepare instead of posting. You optimise before you've figured out what you're trying to say.

This is what I've learned since then. Not from courses or podcasts. Just from paying attention to what has actually happened with my own content over several months of showing up and posting before it felt perfect.

The obsession phase and what it cost me

My early videos have a particular energy that I can identify immediately when I watch them back. It's the energy of someone performing what they think a video is supposed to look like. The hooks were structured the way hook structures are supposed to be structured. The pacing matched what I'd read about optimal watch time. The text overlays were positioned exactly right. And they were fine. Inoffensive. Not unpleasant. But there was no warmth in them, no roughness, no actual me.

The thing about learning the "right" way to make content is that it filters you through a template. And templates, by definition, produce content that resembles other content made from the same template. You can do all the correct things and end up making something that sits in the middle of the algorithm's expectations: reaching people, technically, but not particularly reaching them.

What the obsession phase cost me was time I could have spent figuring out what I actually wanted to say. I was so focused on the container that I hadn't fully thought about what I wanted to put in it. That sounds obvious in retrospect. At the time it felt like responsible preparation.

The moment I stopped and what changed

It wasn't a dramatic decision. I just got tired one afternoon — tired of the note app, tired of the analytics tab, tired of feeling like I was doing homework on a subject I hadn't chosen. I filmed a video about something I'd been thinking about genuinely. Not a topic I'd identified as searchable, not a hook I'd tested. Just a thing that was actually on my mind that week.

I posted it without checking the lighting or timing or caption strategy. And it reached people. Not more people than my careful, optimised videos — actually fewer. But the people it reached responded differently. There were comments that said things like "I've been feeling exactly this." There were saves. There were the quiet signals that the content had landed somewhere real.

That's when I started paying attention differently. Not to metrics as a score, but to what patterns I was actually observing. What had worked in a way that felt meaningful versus what had performed technically without resonating. Those are different things, and I think the difference matters — especially when you're building something small and slow and intended to be genuinely useful to a specific kind of person.

The patterns I've genuinely observed

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to write this section like it's a list of rules, and then it becomes the same kind of content I was consuming instead of making. These are just things I've noticed. My account, my experience, your results will vary.

Specificity travels further than relatability. The videos where I mention a specific time of day, a specific texture, a specific feeling — those seem to land more reliably than the ones where I aim for broad. "I've been finding it hard to focus lately" is relatable in a vague way. "I've been finding it hard to focus since the clocks went back and the afternoons feel three hours shorter" is specific in a way that somehow reaches more people, not fewer. Counterintuitive, but real.

Genuine discomfort in the video tends to outperform polished confidence. The moments where I'm slightly uncertain, where I laugh at myself, where I stumble over a word and keep going — those moments seem to be exactly what makes something feel watchable to me when I see it in other people's content. And it appears to work in the reverse direction too. People seem to stop scrolling for authentic imperfection more readily than for a flawless performance.

The fyp video tiktok algorithm, from everything I've observed, rewards something it can't actually measure directly: the feeling that a real person is talking to another real person. All the technical signals it uses — watch time, completion rate, saves, shares, comments — those are proxies for that feeling. So instead of optimising for the proxies, I've started just trying to create the actual feeling and trusting that the proxies will follow.

The right audience is built by being exactly yourself, not a version calibrated for everyone else.

Watching something find its audience

I posted a video one Friday afternoon in November — a quiet one, not particularly polished, filmed in my bedroom with the lamp on because the light outside had gone by four. It was about something small: the specific peace of a flat evening alone when you've genuinely chosen it rather than defaulted to it. I didn't expect much from it. It felt too interior, too quiet, not quite the right shape for a short-form platform.

Over the next three days I watched it climb in a way that made me sit very still at my little desk. Not viral — nothing like that. But slow, steady, accumulating. Each notification was a small surprise. The comments were thoughtful. People were sharing it with people they knew. By day three it had found a few thousand people who seemed to actually need it, and sitting with that slow climb felt different from anything I'd experienced in the algorithm-optimisation phase.

That's what the analytics look like when something finds its audience rather than being pushed at an audience. It doesn't spike. It travels. It lands with people who then send it to someone else who needed the same thing. That's a completely different mechanism from performance, and I'm not sure you can engineer it. I think you can only make the conditions for it by being specific and honest and patient.

What I'd tell the version of me with seventeen bullet points

Delete the note. Not because none of it is true — some of it probably is — but because the energy you're spending building the framework is energy not spent on the thing that actually feeds the algorithm in the ways that matter: someone watching to the end because they were genuinely moved, someone saving it to come back to, someone sending it to a friend who they knew would need it.

Learn the basics, keep them loose, and then stop studying and start making. The clarity about what you're trying to say comes from making it, not from preparing to make it perfectly. I know that's easier to say than to do. I know the pull of the research phase, the comfort of not-yet-doing because not-yet-doing means you can't yet fail. But the clarity is on the other side of posting, not on the other side of more preparation.

I'm still figuring all of this out. I have weeks where the videos feel flat and weeks where something clicks. I don't have a reliable system. But I have something that feels more sustainable than seventeen bullet points — an actual sense of what I want to say and some trust that saying it clearly is the whole strategy.

That feels like enough to keep going with.

The long version of a simple conclusion

If I had to summarise everything I've learned about content reaching the right people, I'd do it in a sentence: be specific, be real, be patient. The specificity is what differentiates. The realness is what creates the feeling that makes all the technical signals fire. The patience is what everyone underestimates, including me, because the slow climb of something finding its audience over three days feels unbearably slow when you're used to the dopamine tempo of immediate metrics.

I still have the note app on my phone. I'm not going to pretend I deleted it entirely. But there are now four bullet points instead of seventeen, and they all say some version of the same thing: say the true thing, in the specific way you actually think it, and then stop monitoring and start making the next one. The rest is honestly out of your hands in the most liberating way. You can set up the conditions for connection, but you can't engineer the connection itself. What you can do is keep showing up, keep being the actual version of yourself rather than a version calibrated for algorithmic approval, and trust that the right people will find it eventually.

Some weeks I really believe this. Some weeks it's harder. That's the creator life, I think — the oscillation between genuine conviction and genuine doubt, with the posting continuing through both. The consistency is the only thing you fully control. Everything else is a form of trust. 🤍